"Most of the players from both teams would stop by and the place would be packed with fans. A couple of times, I saw James Garner there after a game. He was a very hot actor back then."

So you're in Indianapolis for some ballgames, and you've got some time to kill.

Time for sightseeing. Here are 11 local places that have played a role (in one case, the Westerley mansion, a very small role, but a charming one) in the history of basketball in Indiana.

Note that some of the locations no longer exist. Neto's has been demolished, for example, and the Dust Bowl has been dismantled (though recently reconstructed, kind of). But they're still worth knowing about, and visualizing.

Hilbert Circle Theatre45 Monument Circle, Indianapolis

Here on August 8, 1932, John Wooden, who would become the legendary UCLA coach, and his bride, Nell Riley, having married earlier in the day in a small ceremony, spent their first evening as a married couple. They saw the Mills Brothers in concert. The Woodens met while they were freshmen in high school, in tiny Hall, Indiana. After she died, in 1985, Wooden wrote her a love letter every month. He placed the letters in envelopes and placed the envelopes on the bed they shared, on her pillow. He outlived his wife by 25 years and kept up the routine almost to the end of his life.

Wooden-related bonus: A head-scratcher of a sculptural tribute to Coach Wooden (he is in bronze, kneeling, in a sort of prison made of human legs) is at the corner of Georgia and Meridian streets. Try to make sense of it.

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Club Rio was the scene of a early morning shooting involving four Indiana Pacers in 2006.(Photo: Matt Kryger / Star 2006 file photo)

Club Rio5054 W. 38th St., Indianapolis

The parking lot of this strip club was the scene of some seamy Pacer action at closing time (3 a.m.) Oct. 6, 2006, when ballplayers Stephen Jackson and Jamaal Tinsley got into a donnybrook with several men, including one named Quentin "Fingers" Willford. The dust-up involved Jackson getting hit by a car then discharging his 9 mm handgun into the air.

On the heels of the 2004 brawl with fans in Detroit, and months ahead of another, similar Pacer brouhaha (that one at 8 Seconds Saloon), the incident was emblematic of the Pacers' grim slide into thuggish mediocrity.

The following season the team management cracked down, got more involved with its players. "They kind of gave us places to stay out of," said Jarrett Jack.

Today the team has shed its thuggish image entirely.

The 'Dust Bowl' at Washington Park(Photo: Star 1990 file photo)

Dust BowlNortheast corner, North Street and University Boulevard, Indianapolis

These days promising young basketball players play organized basketball. They used to play, in the off-season, pick-up basketball, call-your-own-fouls basketball. These games were played outdoors, on asphalt, with nets made of chain.

The temple of this culture was called the Dust Bowl, nestled in what was then the heart of the black section of a starkly segregated Indianapolis. The Dust Bowl is where in the 1950s Oscar Robertson, widely considered the greatest Hoosier basketball player, cut his teeth. George McGinnis, who many consider to have been as good as Robertson, played there in the 1960s.

The Dust Bowl was dismantled in the early 1980s to make way for improvements to the Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis campus. Just last year the school restored hoops to the location.

But top-flight young basketball players no longer play much unsupervised ball. No, they play on AAU teams, with uniforms and coaches and referees and parents.

Meadowood Park, 5700 Meadowood Drive, Speedway

"I saw Herm Gilliam jam two basketballs at the same time there, it was the summer of '66," said Eddie Bopp, a guard for Washington High School's 1965 state champion team. "He had a ball in each hand. I'd never seen anyone do that before." Gilliam at the time was a star at Purdue and later would play guard for Portland during the Trailblazers' NBA championship run (they beat the 76ers in the '77 final in six games).

In addition to the famous Dust Bowl, Indianapolis has a second, lesser-known basketball Brigadoon, Meadowood Park, in Speedway. It was a hub of top-flight off-season action, with players like Gilliam and George McGinnis and Billy Keller showing up or hard-fought pick-up games. There were no refs; players called their own fouls.

In 2004, amid reports of ballplayers' excess rowdiness, the Speedway Parks and Recreation Board dismantled the backboards and the rims. Today all that's left is the asphalt.

Gilliam is gone, too. He died in 2005 at age 58.

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Hinkle Fieldhouse(Photo: Frank Espich / Star 2010 file photo)

Hinkle Fieldhouse510 W. 49th St., Indianapolis

Built in 1928 on the campus of Butler University, home of Butler's teams and of high school tournament games. Originally called Butler Fieldhouse, its name was changed to in 1966 to honor the school's long-time coach Paul D. "Tony" Hinkle. He'd coached for 36 seasons — and stayed on for five more, eventually retiring in 1970. It may be most famous for hosting a basketball game that was totally rigged, the mythical state final game in the movie "Hoosiers," won by the mythical Hickory High. (For the real story upon which this movie is based, see Stop #8: Plump's Last Shot).

Indiana Pacer Bob Netolicky (24)(Photo: Star file photo)

Neto's2900 E. 38th St.

Bob Netolicky, an All-American from Drake University, joined the Indiana Pacers in 1967, during the team's American Basketball Association glory days and was rather a character. He flew his own airplane, and kept exotic animals as pets, such as a wildcat. "Neto saw himself as the Joe Namath of Indianapolis," said his Pacer teammate Billy Keller, in "Loose Balls," Terry Pluto's excellent book about the ABA.

"And he even started his own bar, Neto's, which was in the Meadows Shopping Area. For a couple of years, it became the place to go after a game. Most of the players from both teams would stop by and the place would be packed with fans, and who knew that the players would be there. A couple of times, I saw James Garner there after a game. He was a very hot actor back then and he liked basketball so he'd come see the Pacers. Neto wandered around, acted like he thought the owner should act and everybody had a great time."

Neto's has been closed for decades, but Netolicky still lives in Indianapolis (though not in the Meadows area, which has become a high-crime district).

Watkins Park25th and Martin Luther King Drive, Indianapolis

Formerly called Northwestern Park, this is where the triumphant Crispus Attucks Tigers were shunted off to following their historic state championship in 1955. Attucks was the first Indianapolis school to win the title. It was an all-black school, created in 1927 during the height of Indianapolis' segregationist fervor.

Championship teams typically mounted a fire truck and were paraded Downtown to Monument Circle, where they celebrated with their fans. But Attucks' players were hustled back to the black section of town, where they got a bonfire.

Oscar Robertson, the Attucks star (and later a 12-time NBA All-Star), wrote about the experience in his autobiography published nearly 50 years later. "We weren't savages. We were a group of civilized, intelligent young people who through the grace of God had happened to get together and win some basketball games. We'd just won the biggest game in the history of Indianapolis basketball."

He recalled leaving the bonfire early, going home and telling his father: "Dad, they don't want us."

This bar in Broad Ripple was opened by Bobby Plump and his son, Jonathan, in 1995. Jonathan runs it. But Bobby makes a point of stopping by, especially on important basketball weekends. He is in high demand. Bobby Plump was the star of the Milan High School basketball team that won the Indiana State Championship in 1954. He sealed it with a jumper at the buzzer. That shot, and more broadly the team's David-defeats-Goliath triumph, was the basis for the movie "Hoosiers" (1986, starring Gene Hackman and Barbara Hershey), generally considered one of the best sports films ever made. Bobby Plump has been talking about his real-life buzzer beater for 60 years, and he is happy to continue talking about it, so don't be shy about approaching.

Herschell Turner(Photo: Lori Niedenfuer Cool / Grand Rapids Press)

Westerley3744 Spring Hollow Road, Indianapolis

This is a fancy house in a fancy, leafy neighborhood called Golden Hill. It's a private residence, so don't trespass. Here is its unlikely but charming link to Indiana High School basketball.

In the mid-1950s the chief, cross-town rival of Crispus Attucks High School star Oscar Robertson was Shortridge High School's Herschell Turner. Shortridge couldn't beat Attucks, but Turner was exceptional. He went to Nebraska and was an All-American and later played a couple years in the ABA.

Then he found himself. He became an artist, not a famous one but accomplished. People have paid thousands of dollars for his work.

Turner's father was the gardener at Westerley, the home of the Clowes family. The Cloweses were not basketball people, they were art collectors. They had in their house works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Holbein, Rubens and Titian, among others. Originals.

Herschell Turner sometimes accompanied his father to Westerley. The Clowes' son Allen, realizing the lad's interest in art, took an interest in him and more than once showed him around the family's collection, explaining what was what and why it was so fine. "Mr. Clowes knew I was into art, and he'd give me his own personal tour," Turner once recalled. The Clowes' art was mostly old European stuff, and Turner "wasn't floored by it," he said, "but I appreciated it. And it was encouraging to me that here's this man who really really likes art and is spending all that money on it.

And so after a brief pro career, he became a professional artist. Turner had a day job, too, as art director of the Michigan Department of Correction, in Grand Rapids. He taught inmates to draw.

A couple months ago he returned to Indianapolis for a ceremony at Shortridge. His jersey was being retired.

Allen Clowes died in 2000 and left his house and many of his family's paintings to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Today the art museum's director lives in the house.

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The Coliseum at the Indiana State Fair(Photo: Matt Kryger / The Star)

Coliseum1202 E. 38th St., Indianapolis

Built in 1939, this multi-purpose building has been the site of concerts (the Beatles, in 1963), political rallies (John F. Kennedy, on the campaign trail in 1960) and basketball. The coliseum was the first home of the Indiana Pacers, the three-time American Basketball Association champions (and five-time finalists). The team played there from 1967 until 1974 and was known for being a tight-knit brotherhood (see Neto's) as well as an ABA powerhouse. They won the league championship three times and were finalists five times. The Pacers joined the NBA in 1976, as the ABA was collapsing.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.